aging on Consumer Culture

On his hundredth birthday, a reporter asked the man the inevitable question: “What do you attribute your long life to?” The old man replied, “I haven’t decided yet. I’m still negotiating with a supple...

The three immutable facts: You own stuff. You will die. Someone will get that stuff.

Treat the elderly as a nonrenewable resource; they care!

When you are in your twenties, you live to please other people. When you are in your thirties, you are tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When...

Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members...

Fancy and humor, early and constantly indulged in, may expect an old age overrun with follies.

Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being ab...

Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.

I love that part in The Silver Chair when old age simply vanishes from frail King Caspian, because age is the unavoidable meltdown, stripping even the bravest and most beautiful of their former glor...

Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

When you are in your twenties, you live to please other people. When you are in your thirties, you are tired of trying to please others, so you get miffed with them for making you worry about it. When...

It is the privilege of adults to give advice. It is the privilege of youth not to listen. Both avail themselves of their privileges, and the world rocks along.

There are two periods in our lives when we have exceptional freedom: at college age and when we begin our retirement years. At those times, we have relatively few restrictions and obligations.

I love old homes. I’m always drawn to them. The character, the drama, the history. The possibility they possess in a different way than a new build does. Often when referring to older homes, people sa...

Speaking on aging, the Catholic nun Joan Chittister has this to say: One thing this period is not about is diminishment, though physical diminishment is surely a natural part of it. It is, instead, ...

In recent research by the National Geographic Society and the National Institute on Aging, scientists interviewed some of the oldest and healthiest people on earth and observed where they live. Many o...

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it should give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.

Old age has its pleasures, which though different, are no less than the pleasures of youth.

Maturity comes from obedience, not necessarily from age.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

The evening of a well-spent life brings its lamps with it.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, t...

Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is.

God of the Ages, Every day we come face to face with our mortality and the pain of this broken world Every day the need is great in body, mind, and spirit Every day brings disappointment  Every day b...